Panel Celebrating New Books Related to James Pennington

The Yale Divinity School community is invited to a panel event on Wednesday, November 5, to celebrate the release of two new books related to James Pennington.

Moderated by Willie Jennings, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at YDS, the event will feature the following speakers:

• David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University 
• Jan Stievermann, Professor of the History of Christianity in North America, University of Heidelberg
• Eddie Glaude, James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor, Princeton University

The event will take place on Wednesday, November 5, at 6 p.m. in Niebuhr Hall at the Divinity School. A reception in the Croll Family Entrance Hall will follow.

James W.C. Pennington ’23 M.A.H. was an escapee from slavery who studied at YDS (despite not being allowed to officially enroll) in the mid-1830s, thus becoming Yale’s first Black student. He went on to become a prominent minister, abolitionist, and writer, best known for his Textbook of the Origin and History of the Colored People (1841) and his autobiography, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1859). He was awarded, along with Alexander Crummell, an M.A. Privatim degree in 2023 in recognition of his study at Yale.

The two books are James Pennington: Essays Toward Rediscovering a Great African American Intellectual and Reformer and “The Fugitive Blacksmith” and Other Essential Writings by James W.C. Pennington. Both are published by Oxford University Press and edited by Jan Stievermann, Caitlin B. Smith, and Eddie S. Glaude Jr. 

The event is cosponsored by Yale Divinity School and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.